by Laird Hunt
I did my praying and then I lifted up my head because counting had put it in my mind that we needed to increase the flock. I looked around at the heads bowed and the hands good and clasped and put my own head back down and clasped up my own hands again because maybe what I really meant to myself by increasing the flock was that I wanted to see Bud Lancer again, for I am weak just like we all are. That I wanted to go back out into the night and track Ottie Lee and Bud and Pops and Dale down. Who hadn’t been anything like nice when they had been here. Who had done nothing but snicker and were probably, friends of mine though I counted them, like I counted all people, or just about all, on their way to hell. But I was good at tracking. I liked to track. I thought I could find anything and anyone.
My truck was back from being borrowed so I started it up and went driving nice and tidy down the road. I’d had my motivating thought—which was nothing direct to do with Bud Lancer or Ottie Lee Henshaw—and it was that I needed to see if old Esther Cotton wanted to come to the vigil. Old Esther Cotton hadn’t slept to speak of in years and would be wide awake and talking to the moon. I sometimes took her out for a run in the truck with me and she never said too much of anything or smiled much but she was still right smart and fine company.
I always took her out on the smooth roads because she was about the oldest piece of a carapace I knew and bumps in the road were not kind on her. I had not thought of her before in the church and I felt bad for that, but now I had. I drove down the road and did not look for Bud or Ottie Lee. I just about knew where they were, because I knew where they had been heading and all the good roads to get there, and to get anywhere, then and now, but I did not drive that way.
I drove instead toward the moon, then away from it, then toward it again. Esther Cotton liked to tell her stories to the moon. She had lived out a few stories in her day and said when she did say anything that there wasn’t anything better than telling them to the bodies of heaven, that they always listened and never answered and you couldn’t cook it up much better than that. I said she could tell me any stories she liked while we were riding and I wouldn’t answer but she looked over at me and shook her head. She said she would not tell me her stories about what she had done and who she had been if that is what I was asking but that she would tell me where she was from, which was way over in Randolph County, and that she had once had a husband and had had her adventures and had long been involved in stock husbandry and basic crop farming and in all the ways of tending the earth.
I drove through the night toward Esther Cotton’s little corner, which she had bought from Vic Dunn not ten years before. If she was up she would come with me or would anyway appreciate being asked. I did not like any part of the way Bud Lancer acted or who he was in the world or anything except that he had put his hand tender and soft on my face once. He had done it and called me fine and good in the shed out behind my father’s workshop. He had been young and I had been young and he had put his hand on my face and I had put my hand on his hand and shut my eyes. Not long after, I had my accident and got hit on the head and started seeing my sweet angels and had one eye knocked crooked and you couldn’t blame him if he found someone else and never put his hand soft upon my face again.
Esther Cotton’s light was out and her door was dead to my knock and Colonel, her beat-down bluetick, was tied up tight under the spirea bush. Colonel and I were friends and he gave my hand a lick when I offered it over to him. There wasn’t anything young about him either. He gave my hand another slow lick then put his head back down and wagged his tail stump and shut his droopy lids. I said, “Good soldier,” like Esther Cotton always said, quiet, so as not to excite him, and knocked again, hard with my fist, because Esther Cotton had told me I should whenever I came calling, but she didn’t answer. “She hasn’t gone and died on us, has she, Colonel?” I said. I said it with a laugh because I didn’t want to believe it and loud enough for him to hear me but not so loud he didn’t have to answer if he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to. So I decided probably she was just asleep, despite what she liked to say about never sleeping, or else she was talking her stories to the moon too loud to hear me, so I got in my truck and drove off again.
I thought I knew about where Bud—who was alone in the world now and so what could it hurt—and Ottie Lee would be by that time but I didn’t go that way. I went north and east and I went fast like I practically always do. There were folks of all shapes and stripes out and about, walking in the dark on the roads between the fields, and some in cars, but none I knew to name. I was eye-flipping and neck-stretching so much I about didn’t see the boy sitting by the side of the lane. Point of fact, I was past him near a hundred yards when I realized he hadn’t been a bush or a stump but a someone and possibly in need of my help. I always help people if I can. It’s just what I do. I stopped and shut off the truck. It popped and hissed a time or two, then I got out and walked back toward him.
I didn’t walk too fast because you don’t do that when you don’t know who it is you are walking toward and they don’t know you. Also I am aware that because I am tall and have big shoulders and that eye of mine that woggles and scared off Bud, I can scare other people too. Esther Cotton had said more than once to me that she liked it that I was tall and could scare people with my eye and shoulders and that she would like to watch me do it sometime and that she had once herself been capable of creating a similar effect, but I told her that much as I loved her, it wasn’t right to scare people, plain and simple. So I walked slowly and stooped in my shoulders a little as I came up on that boy.
He was a bigger-looking person when I got up on him than he had looked as I went walking up his way through the dark, just plain big, even, but he was still nothing but a young-faced cornflower boy, seventeen or eighteen at best. He was sitting cross-legged with his hands in his lap. There was a bicycle, of all things, lying on the ground next to him. He had a whistle on a string around his neck.
“You catch a sharp rock in your tire?” I asked him. I smiled when I said it. I know I smiled because I always do.
“I say, is your bicycle ailing or are you just taking the air? It’s warm enough to, I know it. It ain’t hot like it was and at least you can breathe.” I had kind of crab-crouched down next to him and now I let myself all the way down onto the ground. Up the road, my truck gave out another pop. I looked up but the boy didn’t.
“What’s your name?” I asked him this because my angels had told me that I must know my neighbor, and I liked to do my best.
“Roscoe,” said the boy. He said it looking straight out over the road and on over the fields the way you look when you aren’t looking at anything but the specks set to floating in your own eyes.
“Is your bicycle hurt? Did you fall off it?”
“I could ride a thousand miles on that contraption and not fall off it. I rode it all the way up from Indianapolis.”
“Well, now,” I said.
“But I won’t ride it, not no more. I won’t ride it another inch.”
“We could put it in the back of my truck. I could fetch it over there and put it in if you’re tired. I’ll drop you where you need to get. Or you could come back with me to the prayer vigil. Do you like to pray?”
“Who are you?” He said this a little like it had just come upon him that I was sitting there. Old Esther did this sometimes. I knew other folks did it too.
“Why, I’m Sally Gunner from over near Frankfort. My mother was Mary Ellen Gunner and they always called my father Handsome Tom. I don’t know you but I know plenty of folks down in Indianapolis. Where do you live? Were you visiting in Indianapolis or coming back from there? Who are your folks? I’d be proud to help you. I’ve been just about everywhere there is to be around here.”
“Have you been to Marvel?”
“Is that where you’re from?”
“It’s where I went.”
“To see the terrible thing?”
“To see someone.”
“Did you see him?
”
“Her.”
“Oh,” I said. I said “Oh” because his eyes had gotten harder and softer both when he said her, and I know what that particular calibrating of the optic inclinations generally means, at least when it is happening to me.
“No, I didn’t,” he said. “She was gone. Her people were gone. The whole street was empty. I would have taken her away from there.”
“They left because of it.”
“’Course they did.”
“Then did you see it?”
He was quiet for a good long while after I asked this question and I started to wonder if he had heard me. He had a fine profile and broad shoulders and great big knuckles on his hands. When he finally spoke up, it sounded like about all the air had been squeezed out of his bellows.
“I saw it,” he said, then dipped his shoulders and shook his head. Put his forehead in one of his big-knuckled hands. That was the gesture my daddy had often made in the days after he got told by the doctor that the cancer had come for him. That the cancer was in his stomach and that it had spread and he was going home with it to the Lord. It was a long and angry trip but he got there. My angels would sit with him sometimes. He thought my angels were gnats to wave his free hand through. Or fleas to worry at his scratches and teary eyes.
“About three mile up this road are two dead dogs,” said the boy. He had a long arm and he detached his hand from his forehead and pointed with it past me and up the dusty gravel.
“I’m sorry to hear about that too,” I said.
“They look like nice dogs. They were just lying in the middle of the road. I couldn’t leave them lie there, so I moved them to the side.”
“Had they been hit?”
“They were strangled.”
“These are calamitous-sounding things you are saying.”
“They had on neckties. I don’t mean like the kind they got going up in Marvel that they looped up for those fellows. After they had beat them. Did you know they beat them first? They did. One of them they hung out the jail window. The crowd was full of women. I saw one woman that had a baby in her arms give a boy a kick to his head.”
“Oh my,” I said.
“It was supposed to be three of them. But they just did two. They let the last one live. I heard someone say an angel had spared him.”
“An angel!” I said.
The boy turned his head sharp, leaned close, put one of his hands on the meat of my arm, squeezed it harder than I liked, and looked in my eyes.
“You haven’t been there,” he said.
“To Marvel? Lord, no, not tonight I haven’t. You couldn’t pay me enough to go there.”
“You can see it in their eyes if they have. I could see it in all their eyes.”
“So it has happened. They have done it.”
“Oh, they’ve done it,” he said. “And if I hadn’t kept moving, they might have done me too. There was plenty called out for it as I went past.”
He said it, then dropped his hand away from my arm and pulled his whistle off his chest and put it in his mouth. I didn’t have time to put my hands over my ears before he blew it. He blew it again and I had my hands on my ears and when he stopped and let it fall from his lips I touched my hand gently to his shoulder, then took it away again.
“You going to be all right?” I said. “You’re not very old. You’re not much older, I expect, than they were,” I said.
“I stole this bicycle,” he said. “And I stole this fucking whistle. I was going to give it to her. Make a gift out of it. I couldn’t find her. She wasn’t there.”
“Well,” I said.
“Everyone has ropes in his eyes,” he said.
“I’ve got some water in my truck, you want some water?”
“Even those dogs had ropes in their eyes. I checked. They’ve still got their eyes open. You can see it yourself. They were there.”
He said this, then gave out another shudder, then he jumped up.
“You want that bike I stole, it’s yours. It’s a good bike. I got offered cash money for it earlier on. It’ll get you where you want to go.”
“I have a truck. Where can I take you?”
“You ever see a dead dog with ropes in its eyes?”
“I never have.”
“Well, I’ve seen two.”
As soon as the boy said that, he left off from me at a run.
“It’s a good bike. It’ll roll all night if you know how to ride it.” He called this over his shoulder. Then he blew on his whistle again and was gone.
I sat there a piece and listened first to that big boy’s foot sounds getting smaller and smaller, then to the frogs and night birds calling through the black and the bats swooping for their supper and, somewhere far off, some dog howling that wasn’t dead. Listening to that howl I got myself the idea that I needed to go and take a look at those dogs dead down the road, maybe fetch them somewhere and put them under the ground where the turkey vultures couldn’t get them, where they wouldn’t be breakfast for the crows. I stood up and started for my truck then remembered the bicycle and thought I would throw it in the back—there would still be room for the dogs—and save it for if I ever saw that boy again.
Only thing was when I had pulled it up, I could feel that it was a handsome-balanced thing. Gave me the idea that if I let it go it would just stand up straight by itself. I admire that kind of a mechanism. Calls harmony to mind. Lets you think the world is wrought truer than it is. I put my hands under the center bar and lifted it up off the ground and it didn’t weigh much either. I’d had a bicycle once had weighed up toward sixty pounds. This one couldn’t have been more than forty. It was a fine contraption like the boy had said and it had a smooth leather seat and I thought I would ride it up to my truck.
I hadn’t been cycle riding in some good while of years but there it was and there I went. The air zipped faster and fresher around my face when I was on it and I was up at my truck in a second. I leaned there against the sideboards a minute and they felt warm in the night and I thought about its pops and pings and wondered if maybe I ought to go and inspect those dead dogs on the bicycle. Swish up about silent to them and not disturb their sleep. I could come back after and get them with the truck.
So I shoved off from my dead father’s vehicle and went off down the dark road. There wasn’t any light on that bicycle but your eyes get used to the moonlight when they want to and I could see as well as ever I had. I rolled, and the corn went by me and the beans went by me and the barley and the crossroads and the trees and the houses and the sheds. Before it had been nothing but people, but now it was just the night. I had looked good into the eyes of the boy when he had looked into mine and I had seen those ropes he talked about. I wondered as I rode if I had ropes in my own eyes now from seeing his or if you could get them only if you had stood under the tree yourself. Had looked up at what was hanging from the tree. Looked up at the boys.
I was watching as I rolled for those dead dogs but I didn’t see them. I was watching too for Bud Lancer and Ottie Lee and Dale and Pops but I did not see them either. I also watched for Esther Cotton for I reckoned now she had left her house and her own dog and was out there somewhere too, but of her I saw no sign.
One time when I went to visit old Esther she was out in the yard and talking to the moon and didn’t quit talking even after I’d come up on her and said “Hi” good and loud. She was telling the moon a story about a man out walking who heard his end was waiting around the corner so he changed his direction and went the other way. “You know better than anyone,” said old Esther Cotton to the moon, “just how that one ends.”
How about this one?
Acknowledgments
The Evening Road could not have been written without the help, support, and encouragement of Eleni Sikelianos, Elayne Sikelianos, Lorna Hunt, Stephen Hunt, Percival Everett, Anna Stein, Clare Alexander, Juliet Brooke, Nicole Dewey, Pamela Marshall, and Tracy Roe. My editor, Joshua Kendall, was particularly clear-eye
d and patient in seeing the book through the revision process: special thanks.
Those interested in reading about the actual events that inspired this work of fiction should consult, as I did, A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story by James Cameron, who was there; A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America by James H. Madison; and Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America by Cynthia Carr.
I am grateful to the staff of the Marion Public Library’s Indiana History and Genealogy Department for their assistance as I read archival materials about the night of August 7, 1930, and its aftermath. Hearing an eightieth-anniversary segment on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered called “Strange Fruit: Anniversary of a Lynching” is what first set my imagination to work.
About the Author
Laird Hunt is the author, most recently, of Neverhome, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice selection, winner of the Bridge Book Award, winner of the inaugural Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, as well as a finalist for the Prix Femina. His novel Kind One was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award and winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction. A resident of Boulder, he is on the faculty in the creative writing PhD program at the University of Denver.
Also by Laird Hunt
Neverhome
Kind One
Ray of the Star
The Exquisite
Indiana, Indiana
The Impossibly
The Paris Stories
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